Paul Hutchinson Simpson shares a positive outcome for resident engagement in Westminster. The Church Street resident engagement team was Paul, of Trisha Husband and Diana Grisales,
Any regeneration project involves a significant number of facts and figures that must be taken into account, such as building regulations and financial viability. Another crucial area that needs to be considered is the views of local residents. Unfortunately, in a local government regeneration project, facts give way to opinions in this area.
Now, this isn’t because those in local government don’t want to have the evidence base of what residents think and don’t want to be able to respond to these. Councils invest significant amounts of time, effort, and resources into doing this. The issue is that very often, the systems that are in place don’t make this possible.
This is where Westminster City Council found itself when it was considering how to meet its commitment to co-design the next phases of the regeneration of Church Street. While a lot of fantastic engagements had been done previously around specific moments (for example, around planning permissions and ballots), the data that recorded this engagement was held in multiple spreadsheets and spread over numerous online systems. This fragmentation isn’t just a feature of Westminster. All local government engagement and consultation teams I have worked with or have come into contact with have the same challenges.
This fragmentation of engagement data isn’t just an inconvenience for those running engagement projects—it fundamentally means it is impossible to get a clear view of a resident’s views across different moments and projects. It also makes it challenging to map these views to the area, which Councils need to have when understanding the wider community’s views on regeneration. This fragmentation also means that it is impossible to build and sustain relationships with residents beyond those that the team on the ground could engage with on a one-to-one level.
Inevitably, the gaps in knowledge that this fragmentation creates are plugged with the memories of those who had run the previous engagement and the opinions of local stakeholders. While these two sources of information are crucial to consider, they will only get you so far.
So, to plug this gap on Church Street before we started the next co-design phase, we embarked on the ‘Church Street Check-in’.
This was a three-month engagement project that used social media, display, direct mail, email, SMS, and face-to-face engagement to understand what the areas as a whole felt about the plans for the next regeneration phase. We also used the campaign to understand how residents engaged with the process and what was the best way to continue the conversation in the future.
And to avoid this engagement creating more fragmented data, we set up a CRM where all the engagement results would be stored. We used NationBuilder as our CRM, which also gave us an integrated SMS, email, website platform, and third-party apps to support doorstep engagement. This allowed us to capture residents’ responses easily, interact with what we were hearing, respond to residents using the best channel for them, and keep the conversation going.
So from February to April 2025, we held over 20 street stalls, attended countless community events, knocked on over 800 doors, sent newsletters and letters, thousands of emails, SMS and more than a few Facebook posts. Also, as we went through the campaign, we changed plans based on what was working and what wasn’t bringing in responses. For example, using services like Bitly and FieldEdge, we could see in real time that our mailings weren’t generating significant engagement, whereas face-to-face engagement was. As a result, we shifted resources and effort from putting bits of paper through people’s letterboxes to putting people in front of residents we hadn’t heard from. Also, email campaigns generated earlier and significantly higher levels of engagement than expected, so we focused more effort here until the data showed we had reached our peak and scaled back efforts in this area.
The result? Over 850 responses from residents and real learnings on what works and doesn’t work in engaging with residents. Those 850-plus responses from residents give us an unfiltered, direct understanding of their opinions, hopes, and aspirations for Church Street’s future. Since this is stored in a CRM, we have a strong foundation to build on as we move into the co-design process.
Also, the Church Street Check-in supported the Council in meeting one of its Fairer Westminster objectives, making the Council’s decision-making process more transparent. It did this by setting out that the Check-in was the first step in a co-design process for the next stage of the regeneration of Church Street. The data collected will also allow us to reach out to those with specific interests and aspirations and have meaningful conversations about what is and is not possible, building alliances and demystifying the regeneration process.
Before going down this data-driven CRM engagement route, a few words of caution. Firstly, a CRM is only as good as the data that goes into it. If team members don’t use it and use it properly, its value will degrade over time as the information in there stops being current. It has to be a living document of all engagement. Also, while decisions need to be made on facts, you still need to exercise judgment and consider what residents have said. They also need to be understood fully by all involved in the project.
So, while the Church Street Check-in is over, it has given us a fantastic foundation to build on – literally.